Intended Audience: SEO Specialists, Engineers, Developers
Impact of website page speed on SEO
While Google does not publish search engine optimization (SEO) algorithms publicly, guidance on the performance metrics that factor into SEO rankings for developers has been published. The most recent documentation from Google indicates that there are three Core Web Vitals of interest to Google’s ranking systems:
- “Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, strive to have LCP occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
- Interaction To Next Paint (INP): Measures responsiveness. To provide a good user experience, strive to have an INP of less than 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, strive to have a CLS score of less than 0.1.” (1. Google, n.d.)
While Google utilizes other metrics, evidence suggests these three metrics are the most important for SEO purposes.
Performance measurement tools
AudioEye® does not recommend relying only on Google Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, or other similar tools to measure the impact of AudioEye’s services due to limitations in how they measure page performance. An example of a commonly used performance tool is PageSpeed Insights, which is provided by Google to help developers understand and improve user experience. This tool combines field data and lab data.
Field data is generated by real user experiences but is limited because it only uses a narrow set of metrics and it can be challenging to debug. Field data from PageSpeed Insights is generated over a trailing 28-day period, which makes it impossible to obtain a “with AudioEye” and “without AudioEye” picture of a site for comparison.
Lab data, on the other hand, offers a broader range of useful metrics for debugging but is limited because it may not capture all real-world scenarios. Lab data from PageSpeed Insights is generated from the Google Lighthouse API, which uses synthetic testing. Synthetic testing purposely slows page loads by throttling network and CPU speeds. Google does not use lab data for rankings.
How AudioEye measures page performance
To determine the extent to which page performance may be impacted by AudioEye’s services, the AudioEye team uses the Chrome Developer Tools Performance Panel to directly measure and compare the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) when AudioEye’s services are running against the same metric when AudioEye is blocked from running.
Interaction To Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are measures that require user interaction on the page. AudioEye utilizes Google Lighthouse’s Timespan Report to capture this data with AudioEye’s services running and with AudioEye’s services blocked.
Page performance expectations with AudioEye
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Since the AudioEye script runs asynchronously and our services wait for the DOMContentLoaded event before beginning the injection process, it is generally expected that AudioEye will have no impact, either positive or negative, upon Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
After the first paint, AudioEye’s services run in the background between animation frames. Essentially, we run only when the browser tells us there is space available. Browsers render 60 frames per second and we aim to schedule within the 16-millisecond gap between frames. This results in a longer script evaluation time overall, but it minimizes negative impacts on the user experience. Thus, we do not expect to see negative impacts on Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a result of AudioEye’s services.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Finally, we do not expect that AudioEye’s services will significantly impact Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) because they do not affect the visual presentation of the page beyond adding a call to action button for users to engage with the Visual Toolkit/Help Desk module.
Final note: relevance and accessibility
When evaluating SEO it is essential to keep in mind that Google continues to maintain that relevance is paramount when evaluating SEO, and suggests that relevance generally outweighs page experience:
“Google Search always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par. But for many queries, there is lots of helpful content available. Having a great page experience can contribute to success in Search, in such cases.” (2. Google, n.d.)
AudioEye’s monitoring helps your team find and fix many accessibility issues that also impact SEO, such as links that do not have descriptive text and image elements that do not have alternative text attributes. There is no evidence to suggest that AudioEye’s services impact performance in a way that negatively affects SEO rankings, but even if it did, teams that take action to fix the accessibility issues uncovered by AudioEye’s active monitoring could potentially see their SEO ranking improve due to relevance weighing more heavily in Google’s algorithm.
References
1. Google. (n.d.). Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results | Google Search Central | Documentation. Google for Developers. Retrieved September 4, 2024, from https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/core-web-vitals.
2. Google. (n.d.). Understanding Google Page Experience | Google Search Central | Documentation. Google for Developers. Retrieved September 4, 2024, from https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/page-experience#how-important-is-page-experience-to-ranking-success.